


Then This is His Madness

by duchessofthemoonbase



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gallifrey, Heaven Sent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchessofthemoonbase/pseuds/duchessofthemoonbase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is more to the Portrait that hangs in the Doctor's confession dial than anyone can remember. Even him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Then This is His Madness

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】那么这便是他的疯狂](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5754007) by [Zerolemis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zerolemis/pseuds/Zerolemis)



> I probably took a few liberties with the structure of Gallifreyan society and whatnot, but eh, who cares, right?

**Shada-The Timelord Prison Planet.**

Flavia could not believe she had been sent to Shada, of all places. Army assignments were supposed to be clean, simple. She assumed the job mostly consisted of shooting people down. Nothing as bizarre as this.

People are dropped off at Shada. It is not the kind of place you wonder around. It’s a dank and dreary sphere of rock in the middle of the Chandelierian Galaxy, where the scum of Gallifreyan society are left to die. And for some unknown reason, Flavia’s commanding officer has dropped her here on the strangest mission she’s ever received: to find a portrait of a woman.

She is beamed down outside of what can only be described as a large dungeon. It is not the impenetrable kind you would find on other planets. It doesn’t need to be. There’s no way off this planet. You are safer inside of it than out.

Flavia wanders through the hallways of the dungeon, grimacing at the moans of people rotting away in cells, people screaming. Eventually, Flavia finds herself at the locked door that she has been told will hold the painting. She presses her finger to the scanner, waits for it to flash its approval at her, and stands back as the door creaks open. She closes the door behind her and can only look up. She cannot believe the size of the place.

The room is enormous, with a soaring ceiling and what appears to be piles and piles of junk, everywhere, like she is standing in front of a landfill. Flavia sighs. This could take hours. Days, even.

Her commanding officer wouldn’t even describe what the woman in the portrait looked like. “I doubt there’s many paintings in there,” he had grumbled, shrugged, and walked off.

Now Flavia understands why, as she makes her way through the massive and extremely unnerving piles of decaying objects: these are the belongings found on everyone who has resided on Shada, everyone who had been shot down by the army, everyone executed by the government. It is all teleported and stored here.

Flavia finds that the things people are carrying on them when they are arrested do not vary much, the room is made up almost entirely of rusting weapons and items of clothing, giving the place a smell that’s something between musty cloth and sour metal.

She turns a corner, and suddenly, she sees it, leaning up against a pile of rusting knives.

Flavia just stands there, staring. The woman is indescribably beautiful, so calm yet so brave, so young yet so wise. Her eyes widen when she catches herself smiling for the first time in what feels like forever.

Flavia kneels down to inspect the painting closer, running a fingertip over the cracking paint. It is impossibly ancient; the woman is probably long dead by now. It strikes her that she has never actually encountered a real painting before, done with real paint. Here on Gallifrey, computer pictures were the norm. And those portraits were never like this. Those portraits were of Timelords and ladies posing with power and dominance, nothing like this, no young women staring sweetly into the distance.

Flavia stands up and presses the communicator on her wrist. “Sir, I’ve located the painting.”

“Excellent,” her commanding officer says into her earpiece. “We’ll beam you up in thirty seconds.”

Flavia grips onto the painting and closes her eyes, and suddenly she is standing on a spaceship, and nearly stumbles when she sees who is on it.

It is her commanding officer, and standing behind him, is Rassilon.

Flavia salutes awkwardly as Rassilon approaches her, snatching the portrait away from her greedily.

He laughs, leering over the portrait in a way that strikes Flavia as extremely disrespectful. “Can’t believe we still had this old thing lying around,” he says.

Flavia swallows and lifts her head up meekly. “Sir?” she says. “May I ask what the portrait is for?”

Luckily, Rassilon doesn’t seem to mind her prodding. “We’re going to upload it to a confession dial.” he says.

“Who’s confession dial?”

Rassilon laughs, raking his eyes over the painted woman’s face. “Who else?”

 

*** 

 

Clara was a child of the desert.

A few years from now, the children at the Academy would call her “desert thing” and prance around her laughing, but that was one taunt she never really minded. It was the truest thing about her.

Her earliest memories were made of warm sun and warm colors, reds and oranges and yellows and browns. The old, soft linen of her mother’s skirt. Sand running through her tiny hands as she built miniature palaces in the dust. The scarlet-red herons that would fly over her head on late autumn nights.

Children never understand their place in the world so young, everyone, as far as they know it, is just like them, and should be.

As Clara grew to be a bit older the other children told her what her label was. Shobogan, an outsider, a wild and unimportant person living outside of the Citadel, the offspring of idiots who failed their exams, who didn’t have the nerve to be Timelords, who would live one short and pathetic life. Her mother laughed when Clara told her what she had heard.

“Look at it,” her mother would say, pointing to the Citadel. “It’s just a glass prison. They’re all trapped inside it, can never feel the true sun on their backs.”

Clara did not believe her, but one day, she wouldn’t just believe. She would know.

 

***

 

When Clara was seven, the sickness ravaged the desert. Death came, stealing dozens of them forever, her parents included. She would later learn that there was medicine inside the city that could have cured everyone like magic, but of course, those kinds of supplies would not be wasted on Shobogans.

After attending more funerals than she could count on both hands, Clara was picked up by the old woman, along with a handful of other children who had been left alone by the tragedy. She took them to a barn, filled with haystacks and farm tools, where she had set up tiny beds, cooked them warm soup, and held them when they cried at night. At the time, Clara had thought it was the worst part of her life, but looking back, it was not bad. She had love, and she had friendship. She and the other children bonded over their mutual grief, played outside and helped the old woman with chores in the morning. She was not alone.

One day a ship from the city landed in front of the barn, and a group of people with funny-looking hats walked out of it, approaching the old woman, who barely looked afraid. Just annoyed that her knitting had been interrupted.

“We hear you have orphans here.” The man said, and the old woman nodded.

Then the man, pale and thin with a thick beard, walked up to the children to inspect them.

“My son has died in an accident,” he said, speaking to them firmly as if they were adults, and not young children. “I need to replace him, to find another child to carry on the family legacy after my death. If you are chosen, you will have an opportunity barely available to Shobogans: a chance to be a Timelord, to live inside the citadel. Who here is interested?”

Clara, always the adventurous child, lifts her hand up immediately, and she is led away. As she waves goodbye to her friends, she sees the old woman staring at her sadly. Then, she thought it was grief at her leaving, now, she understands, it was pity.

That small lift of her hand was something she would come to regret many times over the years.

 

***

 

Clara is nine, and has been declared by her peers, teachers, and foster parents both the most unpopular and the most stupid of all the children at the Academy.

Her grip on astrophysics is elementary, her understanding of calculus barely cemented. She is caught daydreaming in the middle of a lecture on Omega and sent to stand outside as punishment. It is not the first time.

The teachers are always sure to point out that Clara is a Shobogan. The other children have heard the stories from their parents. She is not to be talked to. Clara grows to understand true loneliness.

Her home life is no respite from school either. Her adoptive parents are cold and strict, do not laugh or talk or answer her questions. They begin to regret their decision to take her in when they hear the reports from the academy. She hears them talking late into the night, whispering.

_“She’ll never make a Timelady.”_

The sun fades slowly from her skin until it is gone, until there is no trace of sand left in her things. She has been bleached clean of everything she knew. She learns to master the art of crying silently.

Clara learns the reason the Citadel is encased in glass. To keep the desert out, every grain of sand, any breeze that has touched its hills, any essence of the people who were the shame of the city.

She remembers what her mother said about the Citadel being like a prison, about the absence of the sun.

Now she knows.

 

***

 

Clara is thirteen, and she has just been kicked out of the Academy. She is cited as being aloof, stupid, isolated, and occasionally tempestuous. Clara is not disappointed. She is actually quite relieved. She hates the place, and everyone and everything in it. She asks to go back to the desert but is stopped. There is a special punishment for those kicked out of the academy, a job she must hold until she is eighteen.

Clara’s stomach lurches. She knows exactly what it is.

 

***

 

They call them the Examples.

They are mostly teenagers, all dressed in the same grayish uniforms, doing the school’s dirty work, rolling their eyes at the young Timelord children poking fun at them. They do it out of fear, fear that they will end up on the same path.

Clara spends her days mopping floors, making food, and wiping computer screens. There is technology for this, obviously. That is not the point. The purpose of the Examples is to scare the children into success. To show them the different strata of society. To give the children practice at mocking those below them. The Timelords, of course, think the Examples are too stupid to ever realize this. They do.

Clara is slightly happier now, with the pressure of school lifted and living with the other Examples in the cellar as opposed to with her foster parents. Even as fellow failures, they still will not speak to her because of where she came from. Clara is the only person they have to look down on now. She understands.

She is sixteen now, and in two years she will be free, will move back to the desert to feel the sun on her back. Clara is already counting the days. It’s what keeps her scrubbing windows and doing laundry. The lovely, warm promise of something that feels like home.

One day Clara is ordered to scrub the floors of a history classroom. It’s not a fun job, being on your hands and knees while children stare at you as if you were garbage, but she is thankful it’s a history room. Clara likes to listen in on the stories about power-hungry Timelords, laugh at the extent of their egomania.

It is the start of a new school term, and with it comes new whispers between the students. All of them seem to be directed towards the same boy, sitting in the back corner of the classroom, absorbed in drawing something on a piece of paper. Clara scrubs some tiles near some girls talking to try and glean some of their conversation.

“He’s half-human” one girl says, and raises an eyebrow across the room.

The boy looks as if he is on another plane of existence entirely, sort of dreamy and aloof, and Clara begins to believe that maybe half of him could be from somewhere else. He is a few years younger than her, on the brink of adolescence, with light hair and bright eyes.

Clara remembers how the other children used to whisper at her and immediately feels a need to protect him, but she stays quiet and continues scrubbing.

The teacher walks in and begins to lecture on the beginnings of time travel and the development of the Matrix, and Clara listens along, scrubbing dirt from the corners of the room.

She hears the teacher stop mid-sentence, and then feels his footsteps reverberating through the floors as he approaches the half-human boy’s desk.

“And what, may I ask, is _that_?” the teacher says bitingly, pointing down at his desk.

The boy looks up, looking a bit too proud for his own good. “It’s a drawing I’m doing, of the Cylindrical Spiral Galaxy. I’ve always really wanted to see it, and so-" 

Clara cringes as she sees the teacher grab the drawing, crumple it into a ball, and throw it onto the floor, grinding it down with his foot for added emphasis.

“You need to be paying attention. Art is a waste of time when we have computer pictures. I would advise you not to let your human instincts take over.”

The boy is apparently more offended by the teacher’s taste for computer pictures than his jab at his human blood. “Computer pictures?” he says. “ _Computer pictures_?”

“Enough!” the teacher says, and continues on talking.

Everyone files out at the end of the lecture, and Clara picks up the crumpled drawing from the floor and flattens it out on a desk.

It is fantastic, otherworldly and enchanting in a way you wouldn’t believe a simple pencil and paper could ever capture. It pulls at her heartstrings in a way she can’t quite describe.

She hangs it above her bed in the cellar, and decides then and there that she will protect this boy at all costs.

 

***

 

She learns the boy does not want to be called by his Gallifreyan name. She learns he has decided to call himself the Doctor.

His grades are horrendous, but at the same time, he is the most brilliant one there. He hasn’t a friend or ally in the place, but he is the kindest.

The other children only get worse.

They call him horrible names and tear up his drawings. Clara watches from a distance, as she cleans windows and cooks food, and she feels the anger festering up inside of her.

One night, when she feels like she will explode, she pulls out the old computer from her days at the Academy and begins to write a book. She lays out a new plan for Timelord society, for how to raise and educate their children. A plan with kindness, compassion and acceptance.

Clara hears her mother’s voice in the back of her head, telling her that this book will get her killed.

She knows.

 

***

 

When Clara is seventeen, she discovers that her beauty has some advantages.

A man named Cecil guards the West entrance leading out of the Citadel into the desert. She flirts with him, allows him to kiss her and touch her, and gains access to go to and from the desert on Wednesdays, her day off.

Clara’s first trip into the desert makes her so unbelievably happy that she could never find the words to describe it.

That Wednesday afternoon, she lies down in the sand and feels the sun on her skin, she laughs and cries and watches the red herons fly overhead. She goes back to the barn, lets the old woman hold her and cry, and greets her childhood friends with joy. She is glad they do not ask questions. They see the pain in her eyes. They know.

She has the best meal she’s had in almost ten years with the old woman and the other orphans, laughing at their childhood antics while they eat bread and boiled vegetables.

“You’re welcome back any time, love.” The old woman says, squeezing her before she begins to walk back to the Citadel. And she will be back. Every Wednesday.

On her way home Clara stops by her parent’s old house, now inhabited by a fresh-faced young couple. Clara smiles. She’s glad the place has laughter inside it again.

She sits on the steps of the house and draws with her finger in the dust as she always used to. She remembers drawing places she had heard about in stories, all the places she wanted to go, wanted to see.

She thinks about the Doctor, drawing alone in the corner.

Art is how people escape while they’re trapped.

 

***

 

Clara smiles even brighter now, ever since she has started her weekly visits to the barn. She no longer has to wait until her eighteenth birthday to feel happy, now she only has to wait until the next Wednesday. A weight is lifted off her shoulders.

But there is still the problem of the Doctor. The other children continue to harass him, and there is really nothing at the moment that she can do to stop it.

One day, a Tuesday, Clara is serving up some sort of bluish-green vegetable dish in the dining area, eager for her day off tomorrow. The children are sitting in neat rows, picking at their food, all looking far too grumpy for their own good. Except the Doctor. The Doctor is sitting alone, reading a book, surrounded by empty sugar packets.

Lunch hour isn’t even half over when a boy saunters over to grab the book right out of his hands.

“What’s this?” the boy says, holding the book by two fingertips as if it were contaminated.

“ _Myths and Legends of Ancient Gallifrey_ ,” The Doctor says, smiling. “I’m reading one right now about a Vampire who-"

The other boy throws the book to the ground and proceeds to pour a nearby glass of juice over the pages. The Doctor raises his eyebrows, looking crushed.

The boy walks up to Clara, and points at the soiled book on the floor.

“Clean that up.”

It has taken years, but Clara snaps.

“No.”

Without thinking, she pushes the boy out of her way and runs over to the Doctor, grabbing his hand and pulling him out of the room, dragging him along as they sprint through the hallways.

“Um, where are we going, exactly?” the Doctor asks, and Clara smiles at the slightly awkward young teenager trying to keep up with her.

“Have you ever run away from something before?” Clara asks, a gleam in her eye, as they run out the doors of the Academy.

“No.”

“Try it. You might find yourself liking it.”

 

***

 

After twenty minutes of walking, Clara is quite sure that they are not being followed. She guesses they were deemed not important enough for anyone to care.

“So,” the Doctor says, “Where are we going, exactly?”

Clara smiles. “Home.”

They reach the gate, and Clara winks at the guard, who lets them through, and then they are on a path through the desert.

“You’re a Shobogan, aren’t you?” the Doctor says, now understanding where they are headed.

“Yup. Got a problem with that?”

“No, of course not.”

Clara smiles. “Seems you’re a bit different yourself.”

The Doctor smirks. “So you’ve heard the rumors, then?”

“Half-human?”

“They’re true.”

Clara does not ask for details. “I’ve always liked humans, when I read about them in books. They’re not too different from us, in the end.”

The Doctor only nods. “Why are you taking me with you on your visit home?” he says.

“I’m sick of those kids being mean to you,” says Clara. “Sometimes you just need to get out of the Citadel. To get away.”

“Thank you.”

Clara finds that talking to the Doctor is quite natural, despite him being of a different class, a few years younger, and so isolated from his classmates. They talk so much like old friends that it feels beyond the realm of the ordinary, somehow.

They talk about the Doctor’s sketches, his books of fairytales, how he’s only putting up with the Academy so he can travel, how he’d love to see the planet his mother came from. He stumbles over his words when he tells Clara that he’s always thought she was pretty, and then spends the next two minutes blushing profusely.

Clara tells him an old Shobogan legend about a desert queen who was carried off by a bird, and shows him the tiny purple flowers that grow between the cracks in the dirt. She tells him about her anger and about the book she wants to write. He hangs onto her every word.

Eventually, they reach the old barn.

The Doctor only laughs.

“What?” Clara says.

He smiles. “I’ve been here before. When I was very little. My very earliest days at the academy, when I was eight or so. The old woman, she let me sleep in the barn. Took care of me.”

“She took care of me when my parents died.”

They both share a look, deciding then that they are even more alike than they had realized.

They walk inside, greeting the old woman and hugging her, sharing a meal of warm red soup with her and a few new children she’d taken in.

The Doctor and Clara walk back to the Citadel at sunset, hoping no trouble awaits them back at the Academy when they return.

“You’re turning eighteen soon, aren’t you?” the Doctor asks.

Clara nods.

“And I presume you’re leaving?”

“Obviously.”

“I wish you weren’t.”

They stop walking.

“Doctor…” Clara says, squeezing onto his hand. “That’s one of the reasons why I brought you today. To remind you that if you ever feel alone in there, you can always come outside of the city to catch your breath, to be at peace.”

“Alright.” The Doctor smiles weakly. “And you’ll write that book, right?”

“I promise.”

Clara hugs him goodnight once they are both inside the Academy, and they both manage to sneak off to their rooms unnoticed. They do not speak again.

In a month, Clara will leave, and after that they will not speak for a very long time.

 

***

 

**15 years later**

 

Clara is thirty years old and living in a run-down apartment inside the Citadel. She’d rather be outside of it, of course, but she needs to be here for research.

Her book is nearly finished.

She has been working on it off-and-on since she left the Academy, working at a TARDIS repair shop to pay the rent, and finally, it was ready to be published. Seven hundred pages of her pent-up anger, the injustices she has witnessed, and her spirited calls to raise the children of this planet differently: with compassion, acceptance, and kindness.

Publishing a book on Gallifrey is as simple as uploading a file to the main computer system. But once it was up there, people would read it. And people would get angry. Important people.

It was not going to stop her. So she uploads the book before she goes to bed.

When she wakes up, she is delighted and terrified by how many people have apparently read it, according to the computer. Too many. Far too many to be safe.

She would likely be dead by the end of the week. So there was only one place to go.

Clara walks out of the Citadel into a desert on the brink of a storm, dark, grayish-green clouds swirling overhead. It refreshes and energizes her, somehow. She is proud of what she has done. She can call herself brave now, no question about it.

Clara hasn’t been to the desert in probably ten years. Her job had never really allowed her the time. She feels alive once again.

She is going to the barn, of course. She will see the old woman and the children she played with when she was young, let their laughter and warmth shelter her from the knowing fear in her heart that there are already people looking for her, people who wish her dead.

The dark clouds turn into a light misting rain as she knocks on the door, and hears no answer. She steps in.

The barn is empty, except for one man, sitting in a rocking chair and reading by an old kerosene lamp.

Her breath catches in her throat. It’s him.

He is a man now, and the age difference of a few years that separated them at the Academy has dissipated. He is tall and thin, with bright, searing eyes, and the beautiful worn and long fingers of an artist.

“Clara,” he whispers under his breath, and he stands up, starting to approach her slowly, their eyes locked in a sort of magnetic embrace.

“Hello, Doctor,” she says, and watches as he brings a hand up to slowly caress her cheek, stroking it as if he cannot believe she is real, standing in front of him.

“Why are you hiding out in this barn again?” Clara asks, and he smiles sadly in response.

“Things have not been easy for me here,” the Doctor says, wringing his hands together. “I still haven’t quite figured out how to fit in yet. I come here to get away, just as you taught me.”

They exchange the smallest and sweetest of smiles.

The Doctor raises an eyebrow. “So why did you run here?”

Clara feels her heart sink. “I published the book. The dangerous one. They’ll be after me soon. I wanted to spend my last days here.”

“Clara…”

“Doctor, don’t. This is my choice. My sacrifice. I don’t want other children to suffer at the Academy the way we did.”

He doesn’t argue, but she can tell he wants to.

There is a heavy silence, and the Doctor attempts to puncture it. “Anything on the bucket list?”

Clara laughs. “I don’t know. What are people supposed to do while they wait to die?”

“Well,” the Doctor says, giving her a playful smirk that makes her blush, “You’re a famous revolutionary now. It needs to be epic. You need to be remembered.”

Clara smiles up at him skeptically, and watches him pull a stool out of a corner.

“Sit.” he says, and Clara takes a seat and watches him open a trunk.

He pulls out a blank easel, and tubes of old paint and brushes.

“You’re going to paint me.” Clara says, smiling at him.

He looks down at the floor shyly. “I always want to remember what you look like.”

Clara sits for him for the next few hours, struggling to maintain good posture and trying her best to keep still. Her mind races, thinking about the people in the Citadel trying to find her, the people who had read her words and maybe would be inspired to change things. She thought about lying down in this barn as a child.

Every so often, she would make eye contact with the Doctor, and there was a kind of sacred electricity that would make her squirm in her seat. He was looking at her in a way that was more intimate, more diligent, than anyone had ever looked at her before.

“You can stand up now,” the Doctor said, and Clara decided to spend some time sitting outside on the steps. She drew patterns in the sand as she did as a girl, waiting as he colored in the painting, made finishing touches. There was still a light mist falling from the sky, and the clouds loomed in the distance. The dust was beginning to look more like mud as the time stretched on.

“It’s ready,” she heard the Doctor say from inside the barn, and so she walked in to look.

Clara stepped in front of the easel. “It’s so-"

The Doctor looked at her. “I know.”

It was her eyes. Clara could not believe that such a depiction was possible. All of her emotions, in that moment, seemed to be contained within them. She stared into the soul of her portrait and felt the purest form of astonishment.

“How is that even possible?” Clara asked, still staring. Her fear, her longing, her scars, that indescribable warmth and affection she felt for the man who had drawn it. All there.

“The feeling portrayed in a painting,” the Doctor said, “Is the most magical thing there is. The most sacred and strange bond two people can ever have. It’s not just you painted there.” He pointed at the portrait. “I’m in there too. It’s a hybrid of both of our feelings at that moment.”

Clara could not understand how this man could read the inside of her soul so clearly and capture it on paper, but she knew it terrified her, and delighted her as well.

Clara sat back down on the stool to catch her breath. She was overcome with so much emotion that she hardly knew what to do, what to say next.

The Doctor approached her, placing his hand once again on her cheek.

“You know Clara,” he says, letting his long fingers move down to stroke the soft skin of her neck. “I’m not just a painter. I do sculpture too, sometimes.”

Clara smiles up at him, offering a challenge. “Really? Are you going to make a sculpture of me?”

“Well,” the Doctor says, “I could, but it would require me to-" he lingers his hands over Clara’s breasts, causing her to gasp, and lets them rest at her waist. “-do a very thorough study of all the particular curves and angles of your body, you see.”

“Well,” Clara says, grinning as she unbuttons her green dress, leaving it a puddle at her feet. “Anything for art.”

The Doctor begins kissing her neck, and Clara begins tearing off his clothes, until they find themselves on a bed in the corner, making love in such a frenzy of passion and tenderness that they hardly notice the clouds give out above the roof, the thunderstorm booming across the desert.

When they are done, they hold each other, simply falling into each other’s eyes as they listen to the rain, until Clara puts the silence into words.

“Doctor?” she says, “Do you feel like the two of us are something bigger than this, something more than just you and me lying here? Something we’ll never quite be able to understand?”

The Doctor runs a hand through her hair and kisses her.

“I don’t think, Clara, I _know._ ”

 

***

 

The morning comes.

They make breakfast together, and tell more stories, and dance outside in the dust as the sun rises, and it is domestic and perfect in a way neither of them feel they will ever be able to truly keep.

Just before noon, they see an army spaceship approaching from the West.

Clara panics, and holds the Doctor’s hand. She knows this is the end.

They are watching it come closer, standing completely frozen, when Clara cannot bear it anymore.

“I can’t just stand here. I can’t stand here and let them find me. That’s not me. It’s not what I do.” Clara says, swallowing back tears, staying brave, always.

She picks up the portrait and laughs, trying to cheer herself up, even now.

“I’m going to hang this in my new house. I’ll find a new house, in the desert, yeah?”

The Doctor nods, holding back tears.

“I’m going to run,” Clara says. “I want to die fighting. I won’t give myself to them.”

Clara can see the Doctor’s heart breaking as she turns to the door, and she kisses him on the cheek, squeezes his hand, gives him a look that says everything, and goes sprinting out the door, the painting under her arm.

As the Doctor watches her run across the desert, sand kicking up in a cloud behind her, the same words keep running through his head.

_Don’t run. Stay with me._

 

***

 

Eventually, Clara will have to stop. But she won’t.

The ship is for transport to Shada. They are going to send her to Shada. No one leaves Shada once they are there. Her desert, and her Doctor, will be gone forever.

She wonders if the Doctor is watching her run from the window of the barn.

They are yelling something at her from the ship, threats, she would assume, and they get louder and louder as she keeps pounding her feet along the sand, more determined than she’s ever been. She is running. Away from the Citadel, away from the pain, away from a world that never liked her. And she will never, ever stop.

She screams as the bullet hits her back, a sharp sting of pain that knocks the breath out of her lungs, knocks her over.

And then there is nothing.

 

***

 

They beam the painting to Shada with the rest of her belongings.

They wipe all memories of the dangerous woman from the man in the barn. Make sure no revolutionary ideas stick around in his head.

They cover the girl’s body with a white sheet. They leave her there.

The man will find her there later, will no longer have any idea who she is or what she meant to him.

Three days later, the flies will come.

 

*** 

 

When the man in the barn is much older, and has used up many faces, he decides to go searching for a woman he met twice, and lost twice as well.

He will lock himself in a monastery, on Earth, in the year 1207, to think. To try and remember her, try and find some sort of clue to where he can find her again.

He decides to paint her, capture her face to memory. He is no artist, but the brushstrokes seem to come naturally to him, as if it is a face he had painted before, long ago. There is a sense of déjà vu, and then it is lost as quickly as it came.

 

 ***

 

When the man in the barn is older still, he will see a painting he did over 2,000 years ago, and not know where it came from or what it once meant. To him it is only a painting of his beloved, done by some stranger, the only part of his personal hell he likes.

Later, he will write the word ‘BIRD’ in the sand with his fingertip, and for the briefest of moments he will smell drying paint, feel sand between his toes, and see a girl pointing at scarlet-red herons flying above the desert. And then he will forget.

 

***


End file.
